“You want to step outside and talk about this?,” said one of the other reporters at my desk. I thought that my career was over, that no one would ever want to hire me because I was the intern that got into a fistfight with a reporter twice his age. I tried to diffuse the situation.
“Listen man,” I said, “Why don’t I buy you a beer after work and we’ll talk about the paper. I don’t think what I said was mean spirited, I want this paper to be good.”
He didn’t care. “Fuck you,” he kept saying. “Let’s go outside, pussy.” He was really saying this stuff, over a blog comment. It was like a bad dream.
OK, talking wasn’t going to work. I decided to just turn back to my computer and hope that he quits. No dice.
“Go back to your blogs while we pay you, you fucker,” he said.

Everybody knows that interns get the short end of the stick; that’s why they’re interns. But after the jump, one reader tells a hair-raising tale of anger, resentment and frustration in the hallowed halls of the city’s (at least for now) two biggest daily newspapers. As Chapter 11 proceedings move on for the Inquirer and Daily News, it’s a story worth telling: Though the rank and file like to say otherwise, the rot at Broad & Whatever wasn’t entirely from the top down — unfortunately, it came from all over.

I was a journalism major taking 18 credits while working a full time job during the fall semester of my senior year. I already had a bunch of internships under my belt and was developing a nice sideline in freelance writing (I didn’t sleep much during college), but the Inquirer was a place I absolutely had to work at. I grew up reading the paper — still read it daily at that point — and it was my dream at the time to be a reporter there. So when they opened the place up for internships (apparently this was the first non-summer internship program they ever hosted) and I was selected, I was ecstatic. I shifted my work schedule to fit the internship in, and worked it out with my college that I would be receiving credit for an independent study since I had already maxed out internship credits. Everything was awesome.

My first couple of weeks there were great. I met a few writers I had come to admire over the years, and went on assignments cooler than anything I had ever done before. In my first four or five days there I had collected (I think) three bylines, albeit on stories that were of little importance. But my writing was in section A of the frickin’ Inquirer, on page two even. My life was incredible.

Then, during my second full week there, the editor in charge of the desk pulled me aside. He had a morose-as-hell look on his face, and he said to me, “You’re going to have to lay back a while, we just had a shitstorm handed down to us from on high.” He said things were going to get bad around there, and boy, did they. The shitstorm ended up being the first big round of buyouts and layoffs — the ones that, in my mind at least, mark the beginning of the third act in the Inquirer’s tragedy.

The tone of the newsroom was night and day. People were angry, huddling in corners and gossiping. The paranoia was palpable, everyone was freaking out: What if not enough people take the buyouts? Who is going to get laid off? A photo intern I spoke with fairly regularly said he had all his assignments taken from him and was forced to basically sit and stare at the wall all day; in his eyes, the photo desk, attempting to prevent any layoffs, was making its paid staff to act as busy as possible.

My desk took a similar approach with me. They ignored me, pretended like I didn’t exist. Initially, I pitched things or asked for stuff to do repeatedly. Once it became clear that I was annoying them — and that some outright resented my presence — I only approached once or twice daily. The editor did at one point throw me a bone. The catch was, he wanted me to work with another section editor — in other words he was passing me off to someone else.

So I talked with that section editor once or twice about what he wanted in the story. In what was maybe our second or third conversation, he essentially told me he wasn’t interested in helping me with any story at all, saying, “Fuck man, my days here are numbered, I’m thinking about taking this buyout and getting out of here.”

Great. So the people I’m supposed to be working with don’t want me around. The guy they shuffled me off to blows me off because he’s taking the buyout. It was clear that I wouldn’t be doing more reporting or getting more bylines. What the hell was I supposed to do? Well, I’ll tell you what I did: I went in there and read newspapers and blogs all day. They might have been too preoccupied with buyouts and contracts and paranoia to give me work to do, but I wasn’t against just showing up, fulfilling the bare minimum of my agreement and getting the line on my resume. What better choice did I have? Of course, I understood their position to an extent; they all had families to feed and bills to pay, their allegiance was to themselves, not to the kid who hoped to one day join their ranks. I chalked it up to bad timing more than anything else, but that doesn’t mean it was any less frustrating for me.

Then one day a few months in, I was reading one of the blogs the Inky & DN had at that point put up. The writer had written a post along the lines of, “How do we save the Inquirer and Daily News?” He invited people to comment about what was wrong with the paper, and what needed improving, and he wanted it from anyone and everyone, readers and staffers alike. I decided to leave a comment, the exact contents of what I don’t remember, but I do remember that it was constructive criticism along the lines of “Too much AP, the city desk needs more neighborhood-centric reporting, etc.” Stuff that three years on, the Inquirer seems to be trying to do but definitely wasn’t doing then and even an intern could see what was wrong.

Anyways, I apparently left something identifiable in the comment. I can’t remember what, but I probably just signed it with my full name. Dumb move by me, I admit. The next thing I know, one of the other reporters at my desk, the one directly behind me who had barely said a word to me during my several months there, is talking to me. And he’s not just talking to me, he’s talking bona fide shit.

“So you think this section sucks, huh? What the fuck do you know? You just show up here and get paid to look at blogs all day.”

Let me take this moment to say I wasn’t paid at the Inquirer, not even when they printed my work. I was there by choice, for free, everyday. No interns were paid ever, as far as I know. I was there because I wanted to learn, and because working at the Inquirer had been a dream of mine. But this guy assumed I was paid to be there, and suddenly the resentment made a little sense: It’s possible that they looked at me funny because they thought I was somehow taking their money.

I responded, “I’m not paid to be here,” but he didn’t care. He was turning red and angry. This guy was short and pudgy and at least twice my age. I, on the other hand, am a pretty big guy and I was young and in shape. This did not stop him from going to the ol’ fratboy standard:

“You want to step outside and talk about this?” He may have added some expletive in there, I’m not sure because there was a major freak out happening in my mind. I thought that my career was over, that no one would ever want to hire me because I was the intern that got into a fistfight with a reporter twice his age. I tried to diffuse the situation.

“Listen, man,” I said. “Why don’t I buy you a beer after work and we’ll talk about the paper. I don’t think what I said was mean spirited, I want this paper to be good.”

He didn’t care. “Fuck you,” he kept saying. “Let’s go outside, pussy.” He was really saying this stuff, over a blog comment. It was like a bad dream.

OK, talking wasn’t going to work. I decided to just turn back to my computer and hope that he quits. No dice.

“Go back to your blogs while we pay you, you fucker,” he said.

Let me add here that this was happening in a crowded newsroom. There were people all around, and I think it would be impossible for them not to notice their veteran reporter spewing expletives and challenging an intern to a fight. The fact that no one came over and tried to diffuse the situation, that this guy’s boss didn’t step in or that one of his buddies didn’t try to get one of us to walk away, speaks volumes to the attitude in the newsroom at the time. Either they put their heads in the sand in hope that the bad situation would blow over and no one would have to step out and do something, or they just resented the young ambitious intern so much that they enjoyed watching this guy try to fight me.

Eventually I just grabbed my stuff and left for the day, because this guy was not stopping. It took all I had in me not to accept his offer to “chat” outside.

Later, I contacted the author of the original blog post about removing the comment, but he politely refused, which was the right call on his part as far as blog ethics go (I think… do blog ethics truly exist?). Then I got a phone call from the editor, my supervisor. He basically said it would have been wise for me not to comment on the blog at all (I agreed) but that I didn’t do anything wrong, and that the reporter who wanted to fight me was entirely out of line. He suggested that maybe I take the next day off and my desk would be moved.

Turns out, that was a fucking lie. My school informed me that my internship was cancelled and I had to have a meeting with the internship coordinator. My school had thrown me under the bus and was blaming me for upsetting this guy to the point that he would verbally attack and challenge me to a fight. Apparently, I was in big trouble and blah blah blah, whatever; I was just pissed off that they would side with an imploding corporate entity with angry staff that threatens their students rather than me, who was paying tuition. Worst of all, my academic adviser never filed my paperwork for the independent study, and so I didn’t get any credit at all. Fuck.

Several years and several jobs later, I am out of print media. Though I do occasionally freelance, any dreams I had of a lifelong career as a reporter are over. Sure, the downfall of the industry has a lot to do with that, but I would be lying if I didn’t say my experience at the Inquirer didn’t disillusion me just a little bit. I can’t say that the reporter challenging me to a fight was the big reason for disillusionment, but it does serve as a handy symbol for all the culminating elements at the Inquirer. And with all this said, let me conclude by saying I still want the Inquirer to be good, to recapture its Pulitzer-winning days. It’s still the paper that made me fall in love with journalism. I want the best for it. I hope they find a way to save it and the Daily News through all this bankruptcy stuff. So, good luck with that.

– Anonymous

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 4:33 pm.